49 books like Sherwood

Maybe this is cheating, but it’s still a book set during a war, albeit a fantastical one.

But come on: Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin, Nimue, Pellinore, Gawain, Mordred, the Round Table–I may never have read a more powerful scene (or seen such, in the play) as when Arthur cheers for Lancelot to ride and save Guinevere from a fire which Arthur himself set!

Moving, with great, classic prose typical of the time and White’s contemporaries C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. 

Mentions of the historical Arthur—a war duke, not a king—date him to the late 5th and early 6th centuries. Merlin’s dates are fuzzier. Whyte sets this tale of Merlin’s origins in Roman Britain, consistent with the historical Arthur, as the withdrawal of Rome’s legions leaves the colony subject to invasion and insurrection. Young Publius, nicknamed Merlin, is a soldier and a blacksmith. He and his cousin Uther battle to keep Britannia from crumbling around them as Roman society is beset by external marauders and internal strife. Through it all, Merlin is intrigued by stories of a stone that fell from the sky—an iron-rich meteorite that has rendered steel, and which Merlin can forge into an incredible sword. In this richly developed story, Merlin is not a druid or a sorcerer, but a smith.

One of the key characters in the Arthur legends is Guenevere, and nowhere does she become more real than in Parke Godwin’s Beloved Exile. In post-Roman Britain, after Arthur’s defeat by the Saxons, a mature and bereft Guenevere is taken captive by a Saxon thane. Keeping her identity secret, she struggles through life as a slave in her enemy’s household. Yet, in her soul, she is still a queen and cannot bear to see her nation torn by treachery and internal conflict. She becomes attached to the Saxon family she now serves and discovers that, in order to preserve Arthur’s legacy, she must make allies of her enemies.

This is perhaps my favorite historical novel ever, not only because of Godwin’s evocative prose (“Half a baby in a ditch.” Brrr!), but because it contains an extended section on the “little people,” the mound dwellers who predated the Celts in Britain. These people became the fairies, elves, and gnomes of legend, but in Firelord they are the last of a dying culture, trying desperately to survive in a changed world. They capture a wounded Arthur, and as they take him underground, the author’s voice alters radically. It brilliantly captures the alien nature of the mound dwellers and their hypnotic effect on Arthur. Only after Arthur leaves them behind does it return, like Arthur, to something familiar.

On the face of it this is just another book about walking in the countryside: so what? Well, it is far more than that. There is a depth and breadth to the challenge of the walk that is entirely unexpected. The idea behind the book was to walk from the south coast of England northward to the Scottish border and in doing so to develop a new trail through the English countryside, and in doing so he plants an acorn every mile in the hope that a line of oak trees would be his legacy. There his however so much history and philosophy drawn into the narrative that the book ends up being simply endlessly fascinating. You are constantly diverted by the quality of his observations and thoughts about the ever-changing countryside, intermingled with the observations by past writers, the history of the English, and indeed the deeper history of… show more.

John Morris was an ancient historian specializing in the later Roman Empire who late in life turned his attention to Dark Age Britain. I only met him very briefly at a conference in the mid-1970s, by which time he was already very ill. He wrote by far his best-known work while presiding over the translation of a host of source materials for early medieval Britain and their publication by Phillimore, all the time fighting his own battle against cancer. He didn’t just accept Arthur as a real historical figure but made him the pivotal figure of British history in the decades around 500, accepting as authoritative all sorts of stories written many hundreds of years later. In so doing he was largely responsible for bringing the Arthurian Period of British history into existence and certainly gave it enormous popular appeal. Rarely has one writer had such an impact on a… show more.

I love cheese, and I love how British cheeses have reinvented themselves as dairy farmers have been forced to diversify in order to keep in business.

This fascinating book has taken me on a journey around the British Isles and in time and place from the Stone Age and the Roman era, the influence of Monasteries, the post-war industrial boom, to right now, and the renaissance of traditional farmhouse artisan cheesemaking.

I love this book because it does not just outline British cheeses; it is also the human story of the people who handcrafted them. Best of all, I can actually find and purchase some of these cheeses to enjoy while reading the book!

One of the greatest ‘what-ifs?’ of the Jacobite movement centres on the English Jacobites and the fundamental question of why they were so politically important within the movement and yet so useless in terms of achieving a Stuart restoration. 

England was the most powerful of the three kingdoms of the British Isles and a major section of the Tory party, the most popular party in England, episodically developed a yearning for such a restoration. Yet it never took off. Monod’s classic book explores English Jacobitism in admirably fine and lucid detail and provides the best answer we are going to get.

This mammoth book leaves no stone unturned in investigating how and why claims arose regarding the alleged murder of King James VI and I in 1625. It reads as part dossier or evidence and part detective story–and thus, it is never boring.

The authors are canny enough to make no definitive claims about James’s death–but their methodical investigation into why people at the time and afterward suspected foul play will leave readers in little doubt about what probably happened…

This is a detailed directory, with alphabetical entries, one for each instrument maker showing, where available, dates, addresses, guild membership, apprentice and apprentice-master relationships, and other pertinent information for each. The information is of great value to collectors, researchers, curators, and anyone who wishes to date antique scientific instruments, and learn more about the makers.